The world's best action RPG work that was worth the wait! The game allows you to feel that your character, which you carefully created, comes to life in a high fantasy world. Like a TRPG, you are provided with a stage where you can interact with the world at your leisure. The action has changed from the first game in many areas, but it has evolved to the highest level where players can enjoy dynamic battles with multiple large monsters. The storyline shares similar thematic elements with the first game in terms of consequences of the choices made by the Arisen. All in all it's making this a work that can be enjoyed over and over again.

The game is great when it sticks to the basics. The combat is fantastic, the character development and world building is good, some of the minigames are awesome (chocobo racing is my favourite). What lets the whole thing down is the overdone extras. So many unnecessary stops and starts and hand-holding (world intel, CHAD, unnecessarily slow cutscene like sequences where you walk slowly and press L2/R2) as well as way, way too many minigames. It just felt like a chore to get through. So while there's a 20 hour gem hidden in here, you're forced to sift through 20 hours of rubbish to get to it.

I feel like the best way to describe Radiant Dawn's story is "excuse". Nothing feels natural, it all feels forced together for the sake of creating a war plot.

Intelligent System just never has done direct sequels well. You've Mystery of the Emblem which basically recycles the Shadow Dragon story with a few tweaks and then you've Radiant Dawn, which completely throws away all of what Path of Radiance created, to tell an embarrassing poorly written story. Of course I mean direct sequel in sence that the story takes place after the previous games, so games like Tharcia 776 and Blazing Blade (which takes place during and before their previous game respectively) don't count in what I'm talking about.